Heresiarch
by Drawlords
Summary: Given a task she doesn't understand, a dead woman travels to the galaxy's furthest corners and darkest pits untouched by Light, while being relentlessly pursued by soldiers and scientists claiming she's responsible for the death of a hero. But memories can only stay hidden for so long, and the choice between saving the galaxy and saving herself may end up being impossible.
1. AI Constructs and Cyborgs First!

Ever woken up after being dead? No? Didn't think so. Don't recommend it. For some reason it ends up with a whole gaggle of people running after you because corpses aren't supposed to be up and about - who knew? Also comes with a distinct lack of memories of, well, anything and everything. Still know how to walk, run, fight. My name? Nothing. Home? Nada. Family? Zilch. Friends? Yeah, right. My brain's empty enough you could fill it with three people's lifetimes and still have room to spare. Right now all I have is a piece of metal speaking in my head that calls herself a Ghost, and all she keeps saying is "Get the hell out of here."

I'm inclined to agree with the thing, considering the aforementioned corpse chasers. Where is 'here', and why am I getting out of it? Well, 'here' is something called a citadel. The Citadel? Wasn't paying much attention at the time, I just need to get out of it. Off it? I crash through a glass display and land on my feet twenty metres down, the shards raining down like snowflakes. Whoops - guessing that was expensive. No time to ponder that, though, there are shouts blasting from the shop I just sprinted through.

A whole bunch of _this way's _and _enhanced _and one key _cut her off at the checkpoint _enter my ear canal. Checkpoint? Security? Maybe. So many unknown variables. Would be too many without the Ghost.

"Keep going down," she barks.

Right, down. I flip over the walkway's railing. That's a lot more glass than the display I just obliterated. Sliding down slanted windows is a smooth ride, until it isn't. Then it becomes a jagged plummet with spiky shards stabbing into your thighs and ass. Unpleasant. Also wouldn't recommend.

Uh oh, there's a hole here. "Jump it," the Ghost says.

"I figured that, thanks." With a leap I careen past the balcony of a cafe. A blue woman with tentacles on her head gasps and drops her tea all over herself. Wonder why she's blue? Back on the glass, too bumpy for my liking.

"What now?"

"Jump."

"Again?"

"Jump!"

At its insistence I throw myself from the jagged slide and plummet into a pile of haphazardly prepared stalls, pulling a whole row of them down. Can't catch a break with the property damage, can I?

"Alleyway dead ahead. Through there."

Leaping from the newly consecrated pile I slip into the alley. Darker. Better. Easier to blend into the shadows. Before I move from the alley's mouth a pair of the same bird-looking boys rush past, spurting into a radio and throwing around all sorts of hand movements. Good thing I didn't leave. It's surreptitiously easy to blend the shadows around me, like they're my very own cloak and I've stitched it all by myself.

"You're getting the hang of it already," the Ghost quips.

"Excuse me?"

"Nevermind. The junction up ahead leads directly to the tunnels that'll take you to the spaceport."

"Spaceport?"

"How else would we get out of here?"

I shrug to the air. "I don't know where this is."

"Space! Now, move it."

Ignoring the fact that I'm currently in space - suppose 'Citadel's' an appropriate name if I haven't even seen space itself this whole time - I sprint across the rubbish-decorated street to the other side, where a half-opened grate is there waiting for me. Ducking into it, I make sure to close it all up before crawling on. Don't want anybody trailing me. "Good job," the Ghost says. "Now, go straight, and keep going straight. When you see ships, we've got to the right place."

"Got it."

Pulling myself through these vents is easier than I expected. They're big, big enough to hold a solid crouch in. Are they even vents? I confess I don't know much about ventilation or heating in general. Guessing past-alive me wasn't much of an electrician. Is that the right title? Doesn't matter, focus on the mission. Need to get the hell out of here.

Turns out following a few kilometres of the exact same tunnel system, built in the exact same fashion isn't the most exciting adventure. I liked it when there were people with guns yelling at me. There was a risk there. Something fun. At this point I'd be okay with dropping out in the middle of a restaurant, shouting "I'm a wanted corpse," and then start mad dogging it for the closest exit. Hmm.

"Why did you stop?"

"How astute of you." It's true, I've just stopped in the middle of one of the million turns I've experienced three million times over already.

"Very funny, we need to keep moving, so why have you stopped?"

"This is boring."

The Ghost decides such a response deigns her appearing in the flesh, or metal I suppose. She's a children's drawing of a star with all the symmetrical points. Except for the fact every motion is preceded and followed by a series of complex mechanical motions whirring under the hood. Complicated little thing.

"Look," she begins. How stern. "If we don't get out of here as fast as possible, with as little commotion as possible, then we'll have no chance of escaping, and then everything's ruined."

"Why do we need to escape? The only reason they started chasing me was because you told me to start running because you said they'd chase me."

"A fine observation, but your circumstances aren't, shall we say, normal."

I nod, "Gathered that."

She ignores me. "And, if you went with them… Well, you'd be dead."

"I died once, what's a second time?"

"That second time would be a lot more permanent. Without me the first one would have been, too."

"Also gathered that."

The Ghost spins in place. "Only post-hoc."

"Yeah, yeah, smartass. Fine, if me going with them means me being dead forever and ever and ever, then fine. I'll keep moving."

"Thank you, and every second we spend arguing about who's good, who's bad, and who's dead, the less of a chance we have of getting out of here safely."

"Read you loud and clear, captain. Still, horrendously boring."

The Ghost vanishes back inside my head. "Trust me, you won't be bored much with the things we'll be doing."

The promise of less boring activities can only assuage for so long. Another kilometre, and my mind starts to wander again. "Don't I have to eat at some point? Haven't heard a tummy rumble this whole time. Would have thought outrunning authorities would be tough on the muscles."

"Oh, it is, but thankfully those biological worries are forgotten issues."

"And why is that?" Ooh, this section has a grate I can see through. A whole group of the blue-armours are coordinating something, huddled around a big orange thing one of the walking birds has around his arm. Guess they're still looking. Fun.

"In due time."

"You're a real tease."

"Comes with the job," the Ghost says with a smile I can hear.

Boredom's end comes in the form of another grate in the 'ceiling' of the tunnels. Popping it open's easy enough, and I come up inside the back of a restroom. Quaint. In the corner's a weird green insect looking thing. Gives me a dull stare with its bulging eyes before turning back to its terminal.

Peeking outside the restroom reveals exactly where we need to be. A whole row of ships are lined up, fastened in place to the Citadel's docking systems. Big, small, pristine, scraped to hell and back. Huge crates and containers litter the port, some locked up tight, but others have been left half unpacked, like the workers just upped and left halfway through their shift. How odd.

"Our ride's at the far end of the dock. A freighter, the only ship on the whole ward cleared for takeoff."

The security checkpoint to the dock has been militarised. A whole squadron of blue-armours stand at the ready, lethal looking rifles kitted out for a brawl. The only people roaming the dock itself are more of the blue-armours, patrolling, also with those rifles. Anybody who could be categorised as "civilian" is long gone.

"All this is because of me, isn't it?"

"Absolutely."

One of the blue-armours, a bird boy with an eyepiece sticks a finger in another blue's chest. "You haven't confirmed the _restrooms?_"

"Uh, n-no sir."

"Then get it done." Eyepiece is mad.

"Sir." The blue turns and jogs directly towards me. Uh oh.

I slip back towards the stalls. "What do I do?"

"Hide."

"Where?"

"One of the stalls."

I turn back and forth. Blue-armour's still coming. "He'll find me."

"No he won't."

"When we get dragged into prison I'm blaming you." I slide underneath one of the stall doors. Gross, by the way, and hop up on the top of the toilet. I have to bundle my cloak up to stop it from drooping below the door. Why the hell do I have a cloak anyway? Am I going to a Ren Fair?

Two clawed, armoured feet peek into view. Here we go. The first stall flies open at his request, and I'm stuck all the way in the last one. I start absentmindedly tapping my fingers on the toilet seat, and my feet begin to slip. I'm a spring being squashed down further and further with every stall he opens.

"Stay. Still," the Ghost says.

"Easy for you to say when you're floating in the ether."

My stall careens open. The energy bristles. _Release me, _it cries. _Throw his head through the wall. _But instead of ringing the alarm he looks back and forth, and moves on to the next stall. I'm stuck there, frozen like a naked man in the arctic, only nothing's shriveled up.

When he leaves I pull the Ghost back into reality myself. "What just happened?"

With a smug spin she says, "You turned invisible."

"Excuse me?"

"You didn't want to be seen, so you didn't. Simple as that."

"I can turn _invisible?_"

She gets right up in my face. "Precisely."

"And you didn't tell me sooner?"

She glances towards the exit. "We have a ride to catch, don't we?"

"Fine." My sigh could blow down a building.

With my newfound power I make it out of the restrooms without a hitch. The security checkpoint's still inundated with armed blue's, but half of them are just fiddling with their rifles or talking in hushed tones with one another. The other half don't even dare to move. If you told me they were statues or projections I'd believe you.

I hear Eyepiece before I see him. Peeking around the corner to the back of the port, where our freighter awaits, he's poking his finger at one of the blue women. "This entire dock is on full lockdown, Vasir. You and your ship are not leaving."

"Are you a Spectre?"

Eyepiece drops the finger. He seems to already know where the conversation's going. "No."

"Are you a Councilor?"

"No."

The blue woman - Vasir - smirks. "Then you have zero jurisdiction over me and my ship. Tell C-Sec to drop the lockdown or Irissa will be down here herself."

Eyepiece growls. "If you're harbouring-"

"Hang on. Are you accusing a Spectre? I know what you've done, what you helped to accomplish, Vakarian, but be careful where you run your mouth."

Eyepiece, or Vakarian, backs off. Hands balled into fists. Ouch. "You'll have your freighter ready for takeoff."

"Thank you," she says with a smile. Already I can tell she's a snake.

"That's whose ship we're getting on?"

"Absolutely."

"I wish you'd let me stay dead."


	2. Authorised Personnel Only

Turns out Vasir has a lot of cargo to pack in her freighter. Bad for her because she has to tap her foot waiting for everything to load up, good for me because it's a free ticket out of here. It's no deluxe cabin, but hey, it's free. Weaving through the concrete maze of containers is like a game of cat and mouse, the C-Sec guards constantly on the lookout, both in the dredges of the cargo itself and along the catwalks above the loading docks. The ones up there are lugging rifles half their size around, and something tells me they're willing to use them.

"Right," the Ghost says, and I swerve behind a matte black crate. Around the corner a guard passes by, rifle at the ready. "This is the one."

"So what, I just go inside and then when I wake up I'll be on another planet?"

"That's the long and short of it."

I take another gander around the docks. This loading zone by itself has fifteen C-Sec crawling through it, and this is the industrial luggage for the lone outbound ship from this port. "And what if C-Sec decides to actually search Vasir's stuff?"

"They won't. She hasn't given them the jurisdiction. If a Spectre says no to C-Sec, there isn't much C-Sec can do."

"How nice of her." Another guard on the right stops, puts a hand to her helmet, then spins and runs back to the entrance to the loading zone. "What's that all about?"

"Don't know. Don't have access to their comm network. The sooner we get in the crate, the sooner we eliminate all risk of being caught. So, get in the crate."

The crate, emblazoned by a sleek emblem and the singular name _Elanus, _slides open at my behest. "Took long enough." Without a sound I slip inside feet first and clasp it closed above me. I have to crouch if I don't want to decapitate myself.

The Ghost materialises in the dark, her blue sun of an eye the only light to speak of. "You want to do this alone?"

I make wild hand gestures in my claustrophobic abode. She shakes herself like a floating head. "These crates are soundproof."

I drop my hands and shrug. "Yeah."

"Really?" She's halfway to astonished, but still in the city limits of disbelief.

"No, no. That was a joke." I offer my cupped hands to it, like an ornithologist to a baby bird. She rejects me and buzzes away.

"You need some water because your comedy is parched."

"Oh, that's not bad. Anymore sage quips to impart?"

She buzzes to the back of the crate. Oh. That's a lot of guns. Like, _a lot _of guns. A whole rack of collapsed sniper rifles, and resting in their snug casings an army of pistols. "Don't mind if I do."

"We're not exactly going to need them, but I suppose we need contingencies." The Ghost is my very own portable flashlight, hovering over my shoulder. If she wasn't the size of a tennis ball I'd think her my deleterious partner in crime. Well, she technically is, just a bit less organic.

"I like the way you think, Ghost." I snag a pistol up, and in my hand it's auspiciously warm. "I'll keep you," I say to the inanimate object, and clasp it to my thigh.

"Bah, 'Ghost.'"

"Strike a nerve? It's what you called yourself." The grand treasure isn't the pistol, but the rifle. The collapsed stock bristles in my grip.

"I only called myself that because I didn't have a name. 'Ghost' is what I am, and need I remind you I still don't have a name, no thanks to you."

I stop and stare at the feisty shell. "You never asked for one."

She stares back. Stares? If she can't blink is it still staring? "We were busy."

"Yes, and as far as I can remember you haven't called me anything. Just screamed 'run this way', 'do this thing', 'don't touch that.' How do you think I feel Ms. I Have No Name?" I click the red button on the rifle's stock, and it springs to life before my eyes. By the end of it I have a sleek and scoped beauty hefting in my hands. The smooth steel whispers the same word - _Elanus _\- on the scope.

"I…" she spins her shell for a moment, getting out of the way of my newly minted rifle, then sighs. "We were busy."

"See? Not so nice when you have it thrown back in your face, is it?"

"So, then, what is my name?" She zips in front of me and plops down on the scope.

For a moment there's only silence as I tap against the trigger guard. Then, inspiration strikes. "Considering you've been herding me this whole time like a farm dog I think there's only one proper name for you."

She flies right up in front of my face. "Which is?"

I tap her sea blue eye. "Shepard."

She backs off the moment the word leaves my lips. She whirrs and looks away, like she's processing some particularly complex piece of information. "I say something wrong?" I ask with a smile.

"No, no," she says, and all the feisty mirth's evaporated. "Well, maybe. Yes? No. No. I just- I'm not sure if…"

"Cat got your ethereal tongue?"

She focuses on me. "It is a fine name, and I will bear it with pride."

I smile underneath my helmet. "Then it's settled, Shepard."

"Yeah," she says. I can tell she's out of sorts. I let it pass - we're still stuck in a crate, after all.

"Now that I've given you yours, how about me?" The viability of assessing a rifle's qualities in a crate too large for a primary school boy lies a little beyond Icarus heeding his father's words on the futility scale, and with no way to stretch my legs - literally and figuratively - I collapse the weapon again and stick it to my back.

Shepard hums. "How about Guardian?"

"That's a shit name."

"Ugh. Fine, fine. Hunter?"

"Also terrible."

"Vanguard?"

"Where are you getting these?"

She groans, and I definitely wouldn't have expected a floating blue eyeball to look so displeased. "You pick your own name, then, if mine are all rubbish."

I slap my hand over my heart and decry with a sharp whisper, "Call me Elanus."

"Damnit, that is good. Not original, but good."

"And yours were?"

"That's not relevant."

"Uh huh."

A lurch. It throws me into a corner of the crate. Weight shifts. We're moving. "Good," Shepard says, "we're on our way out, I can finally give you the lowdown once we're safe."

"Kind of you."

There's a bang, and it reverberates through my bones like a monk's smacked a gong by my ear as part of some weird monk torture ritual. "That was quick. Usually take a few seconds to load a full box onto a freighter?"

"I confess I'm not entirely sure."

"Well then, let's see our ride." I slide open the crate and stand. The crack in my legs and neck is damn near euphoric.

"-Look Vasir, you can either wait another hour for takeoff, or leave now with none of your cargo."

Oh. Vakarian's in front of me, face ensnared by heavy, angry worms masquerading as wrinkles. A whole platoon of C-Sec grunts are ripping open crates like mine. Shepard vanishes. "They got jurisdiction," she states plainly.

It takes a second for Vakarian to spot the newly sprouted woman, but when he does those worms morph into blazing astonishment. The other grunts - all armoured, all on high alert, and all ready to make great use of those guns of theirs - all freeze. Some with mouth agape, some with a slight change of the footwork, and some simply turning to ice where they stand.

Their wanted corpse has presented herself on a silver goddamn platter.


	3. Flawless Cowboy

Rage.

Rage contorted with concentrated nodes of hatred. Dotted around his eyes, mouth, nose. His flanges twitch in micro-expressions. His arms tense around his rifle. Its cyclopean eye stares right into my soul.

"We need to get out of here," Shepard says in a place only I can hear. I'm on my knees, hands locked behind my head. My fingers flicker in place. The energy wants out. "You can't let them take you."

"I have a plan." A steel cylinder begins to form in the palms of my interlocked hands. The energy in my heart is ravenous, desperate. My legs begin to bounce in place. I'm a jackrabbit about to tear out of her confines. A spring squished flat by a hydraulic press that's about to break. I have to squeeze my eyes shut to focus. It's a greater rush than anything I've experienced in my nascent undead-but-not life so far. Even under all of my armour and the commotion of the C-Sec officers hurrying to cover every angle around me the double, triple, quadruple thump of my heart deep in my chest pulses in my mind.

If I still could, I'd be having a heart attack.

"Stop moving," Vakarian barks. He's edging towards me, foot by steady foot. I clamp down on the overflowing energy. I need him close. The grenade in my hand pushes against the back of my head. The cylinder's small enough to fit in my palm out of sight, but it's growing by the half-second.

Vakarian nods to two others, and the trio closes in on me. Even better. He doesn't say anything else, but the deep scowl he's refusing to remove says all I need to know. He's not thinking straight. Acting off emotion in a high pressure situation. Letting it be personal. I don't know how I know that, but the observations creep forward unbidden, and I'm not one to look gifts in their mouths.

The officer to my left - a woman, young, her eyes bloodshot under her helmet and her shoulders hunched takes out restraints. She's the one. The grenade bulges out a little bit further. Vakarian steps in front of me. "Cuff her," he says on a razor's edge. His rifle's peering eye is planted firmly on my head.

Bloodshot picks me up by the shoulder. Freezes.

"Explosive!"

One swipe and the grenade's stuck to her chest. Wrench her off balance by the arm. The third immediate threat raises his rifle.

Bloodshot careens into Vakarian at my foot's behest. The third raises his rifle. I'm quicker. His gun explodes when my pistol shot collides with its insides. He falls to the floor, crimson trailing from his arms. He'll get better.

Each officer's position burns itself onto the back of my retinas. The sensation throws me off balance for a split second. A round rips through my shoulder - the grenade goes boom.

A storm cloud descends upon the loading dock. Tiny streaks of purple lightning flicker through the dark grey deluge. I'm on all fours. Oh, that's a lot of blood.

Shepard pops into existence. "Smart," she says with a whirl of her shell, "Don't worry about that." The wound snaps closed. With a grunt I can breathe properly again.

"What did you just do?"

"Fixed you."

I stand. "You can do that?"

"I can do a whole lot more if I need to."

A scream carves through the suppressing smoke. "Later," Shepard squeaks, and scurries back into non-existence. "Not out of the woods, yet."

Vakarian stumbles through the smoke and sidles besides me. Coughs burst from somewhere deep in his lungs. Every time he tries to say something another fit tramples him and he collapses to his knees. Bloodshot's not far behind, and she's as worse for wear as the turian, helmet and all. Guess that makes me immune. How nice.

One right hook to Vakarian and a free knee in Bloodshot's stomach and they're both down for the count. Three down.

"Directions?"

"This loading dock is adjacent to Vasir's. Just need to get through the security door, and I'll get you safe."

There are four officers on the catwalk above the door. One behind, two right. One on the floor with me now Vakarian's trio is out of the game. Every step they take re-burns their shadows like they're being flash vaporised against the walls.  
They're not firing, don't want to accidentally kill their own commander, but their fingers are glued to their triggers. They're primed, like me. I glance back at Vakarian and Bloodshot, comatose in the smoke. They're not doing the wrong thing here, I am.

The decision is made in a flash. These people don't deserve to die.

Like it's reading my thoughts, the energy snakes its way down my arm and _into _my pistol. It's suddenly a fair bit heavier.

It looks no different, but besides the new weight something about it's changed. Like an optical illusion, except the trick stays hidden.

"Go," Shepard says, and it's the push I need.

I glide forward out of the smoke. The duo's imprint to the right shifts. I take aim without looking and tap the trigger - the force of the shot rocks my arm towards the ceiling. The railing the pair are aiming over explodes in response and throws them to the ground. A bit of shrapnel never hurt anybody. The imprint directly behind me paints a target on my back.

Then, there's a knife in my hand. Everything's gone slow motion, and I'm the only one with the remote. The knife's edge rests easy between my fingers. An old friend I've never met. With a flick it leaves my hand and sails, end over end, through the top of the smoke in a perfect line. The imprint fires.

Knife and bullet meet in the middle.

"Hah!"

I execute the same railing trick and turn back to the security door. I jump over a crate and roll underneath the catwalk the quartet above the door are using. Another grenade appears in my hand and I chuck it high. When it reaches the apex of its arc I impale it with another shot from my pistol - a cannon, really - and the sounds of the four hacking their lungs out is music to my ears.

Shepard pops up again and fiddles with the door's controls. "Just a second. Be ready."

"Got it," I say, and the pistol's weight disappears. Back to normal. "Huh."

Another imprint moves. Oh. One left. I dodge into cover with a backwards roll, but not before two rounds tear through my abdomen. I grunt behind a crate and, after a moment's consideration, decide to shoot the last officer in the foot instead of splattering her guts all over the loading dock.

Instead of maybe removing her lower limb though, my piddly shot bounces off a bubble that flashes to life around her.

"Kinetic barrier," Shepard explains. "Takes a lot more than a single pistol shot to get through one."

"Noted. Feeling a little woozy here." I keep nudging further down the crate thanks to the incessant suppressing fire.

"You'll live, you big baby."

I fire a wild few shots above my head as a distraction. "I got shot. Twice. And you're calling me a big baby?"

Shepard zaps a part of the door's control pad then moves on to another. "I can call you an adult baby if you want."

"Very…" A groan forces its way out of my throat. A few more bullets go flying. "Funny."

"Aha! Door is-"

A little flat disc lands at my feet. "Oh, that's karma."

I curl up into a ball but the fire envelopes me like a fat auntie's bear hug all the same. The pressure cracks my ribs and throws me onto the floor and something around my neck area snaps. That's not good.

World's turned into a smudgy watercolour. Nice and abstract - something I could appreciate at the Louvre. Having it transplanted into my eyeballs kind of ruins the mood.  
There's a hard thud, and a dark blue figure slumps onto the ground. Then time goes backwards. My ribs remake themselves, my neck unsnaps, and I can see like a whole new woman. Shepard peeks into my purview. "Up, you lazy git."

I follow her instruction, and splayed on the floor in front of me is the officer. "What did you do?"

"Bonked her on the head."

I pick up my pistol. "Harder than you look."

"I'll take that as a compliment," she says and disappears.

"It was."

Sprinting into Vasir's dock is a mistake. New imprints burn. A small platoon of C-Sec soldiers - calling them officers seems like a disservice - clad head to toe in full military gear, and a heavyset mech dead centre are all waiting for me, the birthday girl. Aren't surprise parties supposed to be fun?

"Stand down," the mech thunders. Its gun-arm is the same height as me and probably quadruple my weight. A certified mister. The soldiers are littered around the entire breadth of the dock. All in pairs, all half-hidden by barricades that most definitely weren't there before. Vasir herself is here, too, situated at the other end of the dock, wearing a scowl ninety miles wide. Her ship, the backdrop for the showdown sits comatose in the cold deluge of space.

"We need Vasir."

With slow movements I set my pistol and rifle on the floor. Let's see if this works twice. "Why?"

"Her Spectre designation opens a lot of doors, and, well, do you know how to fly a ship?"

"Nope."

One of the soldiers steps forward with a gun I haven't seen before. Wordless hand signals are exchanged and the collective moves to secure their chokehold. The soldier with the new weapon stops, puts his hand to the side of his helmet.

Oh, he isn't getting close to me, he's going to knock me out at range.

Before he can take the shot with whatever weapon it is another grenade forms in my hand and is midair before I can blink. It smashes against her helmet and smothers five in a weighted blanket of smoke.

"Weapons free!" a voice calls out.

Perhaps futilely - but hey, stick it to the man - I fire right at the mech's glass covered cockpit. The shots dink into the thick sheets with naught a scratch. Worth a try. I slide under it before it can put its oversized gun to good use, but I pay for it with a nice heaping of shots ripping through my chest. Yep, that's painful. Somehow my nose smashing the inside of my helmet as I face-plant the ground is even more painful. The embarrassment maybe? Either way, I'm dying in a pool of my own blood with a broken nose to boot.

The mech's steady thumping is accompanied by a scurrying of feet as the soldiers converge on me, the soon-to-be corpse. Legs enter my vision, a whole congregation witnessing my passing. The world clasps down into a pinpoint very far away and-

Hang on, why don't I care I'm about to die?

"What is that thing?" a soldier says.

Everything goes black, and then I'm sucking air in like a whale gobbling plankton. And then I'm a leap frog, kicking my legs into a chest behind me, cracking a helmet into pieces with my fist, headbutting another onto the floor. And then I'm a panther, a knife twirling in my fingers before finding a home in a shoulder. I plant my feet again. A shot rings out, I duck it.

"Hold your fire!"

Yeah, don't kill your friends. I slap the rifle out of the hands of the last one that made the mistake of getting close and pull him into my chest, my pistol tickling his temple. If you can't dodge twenty rifles, just make sure they don't fire in the first place.

"You know I'll do it," I say. My hostage struggles, but the threat of a bullet in the brain turns out to be a good motivator to behave. Besides, I'm pretty sure I could bench press this guy with one hand.

The mech calls out again, "Stand down."

"Fat chance, big guy. Any of you shoot me in the head this one gets the same treatment, and I know you can't use your overcompensating cannon without turning your buddy to paste, too." I don't actually know that, but it's a pretty safe assumption, and I don't want to kill him, but _they _don't know that.

I whip around to call out for Vasir, but the word dies in my throat when I see her. Well, not her, but Shepard. She's whispering in the Spectre's ear. Vasir nods while never taking her eyes off me, and then the two vanish in a digitised flash.

"What the f-"

A shot from behind tears through my throat before I finish the word. I fall to my knees, my charge running with hands over his ears. I glance behind me. Slumped against the security door's frame is Vakarian, the sniper in his hands cooling.

Then suddenly I'm in a grey box with stale air, an unconscious Vasir at my feet, and Shepard looking incredibly bashful.

"Let me explain."

I punch her right in the eyeball before dropping dead for the second time in as many minutes.


	4. Buyer's Remorse

A/N: For any returning readers that aren't yet aware, chapter 3 has been heavily rewritten. Go read it before you read this chapter. If you don't, this chapter will not make sense.

* * *

Kneeling over someone that's passed out is a bit odd. You expect their eyes to flash open at any moment and scream because their whole world has been covered up by some stranger's face - or in this case, helmet. Then maybe after that they try and run, or worse, stab you. I rub my throat. Once is enough for ten lifetimes.

"So, why did you knock her out?"

Shepard floats above an unconscious Vasir. "I didn't."

"Then what did?"

"The transmat."

"Excuse me?"

Shepard manages to shrug with no shoulders or body or head. "Transmitting materials. Teleportation."

"And the teleportation knocked her out."

"Yep."

"The same teleportation that you did to me second."

"Uh huh."

"After I'd been shot in the throat."

"Correct."

"Which left me bleeding to death all over the cargo hold."

"Hit the nail on the head."

It feels less like a hit and more like a slow drilling, maybe a full blown lobotomy-by-nail talking to Shepard. "Just wanted to clear that up."

"No problem." She spins her shell around. She manages to make it smug.

"When will she wake up?"

Shepard scans Vasir's head and hums a tune I don't recognise. "Judging from neural activity, three hours. Give or take… three hours."

"Great. Doesn't exactly seem normal."

"I can bring you back from the dead and I teleported all three of us into a ship. Some whacky neurophysiology is child's play."

I shrug. "If you say so."

"I do."

The Spectre's locked in a painful frown, collapsed and splayed out on the floor. "She'll be mad when she wakes up."

Shepard floats up onto my shoulder like a levitating parrot. "Probably."

"Should maybe tie her up. Or something."

"Wouldn't that make her madder?"

"Probably."

"So we can't tie her up and we can't just leave her there." Shepard and I look at each other. With a groan I drag an empty crate over and sit down.

Ever played security guard for an unconscious person? Even worse than kneeling over them wondering what they'll do when they wake up, because playing security guard means you're now responsible for them. Can't just let them run away or stop them from stabbing you in the neck, now you have to calm them down and explain everything, too. In Vasir's case I doubt she'll have forgotten much like my amnesiac ass, but I don't doubt she'll want to kill me (as long as that'll last) for commandeering her ship.

Wait a minute.

"Didn't you say we needed her to fly this thing?"

Shepard stops in place. "I did."

Sitting in the cargo hold of a freighter currently travelling many, many times the speed of light I can't help but say, "So you were lying?"

"Turns out I vastly overestimated the difficulty of piloting a standard freighter."

"How much do you actually know about yourself?"

"Honestly, not much," she says, scanning the walls of the hold.

"What even are you? Besides an A.I. that has the power to cheat death."

"I'm a Ghost."

I lay down on the crate. The ceiling is somehow immediately less interesting than a woman I've been watching for an hour. "Thanks, that explains so much."

"What I mean," Shepard sighs, "is that my creation left me with very little in the way of information. All I had when I 'woke up' was that I had to find someone worthy enough to bring back."

"And out of every dead person in the galaxy I was the most worthy? Doesn't seem right."

Shepard peeks into view. "Maybe not the most worthy, but definitely worthy of something."

"That was oddly sweet yet at the same time, insulting."

She flutters away. "I try my best."

"Who created you, then?"

"Light," she says after more than a moment's consideration.

"You mean a star?"

"Something far grander than that. Something far more meaningful."

"Like life?" Where that came from I'm not sure, but if there's one thing grander than a star is it not our own existence? Probably just being pompous. Give me something to do, cosmos, stop me from waxing philosophy someone said better than me hundreds of years ago.

"Yeah," Shepard agrees. "Something like life. But still a little different."

"Do you remember it? I remember waking up in that morgue."

"I remember losing a part of myself. But besides that, well, I wasn't here and then I was. Here being the universe."

"So we're just a couple of amnesiacs breaking laws and causing property damage." I could live with that.

"For now."

"Kidnapping, next? Extortion? Assassination?" Probably couldn't live with that.

"No, no, something far more heroic."

"Ah, okay. Saving princesses from towers."

"And a little bit of saving the galaxy, with a dash of some immortal friends when we get to Omega."

I sit up. "Excuse me?"

In the hour or so after we made it on the ship and I was born again, Shepard had made two things clear. The first was, "We need to get the fuck out of here," and the second, which is far more pertinent was, "We need to get the fuck out of here and get to Omega." Omega being, as she so graciously laid out for me, a space station so lawless there's a fifty-fifty chance the Citadel Council sends another Spectre after us, which is ten times better odds than anywhere else in the galaxy besides the vacuum of space.

"You, me, the galaxy. You know, pew-pew, kill the bad guys." She makes little laser-like noises when she says pew-pew.

"No, no, not that part. Immortal friends?"

I assumed Omega was going to be a means to an end. A detour. A stopgap for the real mission, which, when I think about it, she had yet to tell me about either.

Shepard stops herself. Sighs. "Shouldn't have said that."

"Look, obviously there's a reason you brought me back with whatever power you have, but is being so cryptic about what I - what we need to do - the best idea?"

"Who says I'm being cryptic?"

"I am. There are others out there, like you and me, right? And they're on Omega. Or at least there'll be something on Omega that lets us find them. Unless you really do want to do nothing but get high and gamble."

"In my defence I can't actually get high."

"Answer the question." A harsh, pointing finger shuts up any sarcastic retort she might have let loose.

"There may be someone on Omega who I have corresponded with. Someone like me."

I lean forward. "Another Ghost?"

She shakes herself back and forth. "From the same place as me."

I offer her to go on, and she says, "Somewhere that isn't here. It's not the easiest thing to explain."

"It's not like we're low on time."

"I know, but, I can't."

Don't ever try and bleed information from a floating eye orb, it's not worth it. "Why not?"

"Because I don't have all the facts, Elanus. I barely have more than you."

"So it's the blind leading the blind."

She gets right up in my face. "And it's perspective. If I told you everything I knew, everything that we had to find some way to stop, I'm not sure you'd be able to start, let alone keep going."

It's silly, but I'd be lying if I said that didn't hurt. "All due respect Shepard, but that sounds like bullshit." She recoils like I've insulted her dead, floaty eye grandmother. "Let me offer you an alternative."

"Please," she says, and it's the coldest she's sounded since I opened my eyes in that morgue.

You don't use powers you don't understand to resurrect someone and then throw them away later for something new. Even I'm not that dumb. Or I am, only one way to find out - time to call her bluff with a little bit of a guilt trip.

"You don't tell me what it is we need to do, who it is we need to stop. You drip feed me like an addicted invalid, and maybe I begin to piece together the truth, begin to piece together the puzzle you're refusing to help me complete. I do as I'm told, for a time, but the collar around my neck will begin to itch, then grate, then burn. I'll rip it off, and you know what happens after that?"

"What?"

"Hatred. Resentment. And then we're cut off forever. Maybe it's fair, maybe it's not, but it's what will happen."

"You don't think highly of yourself."

I chuckle. "I guess I don't. My point is, Shepard, I'm betting that you need me as much as I need you."

Shepard nods. "If I lose you I can't bring another back."

Bluff called.

"Then let's not be guide and tourist, or, well, shepard and sheep. We need to be partners. And if you're going to be my ticket to immortality and I'm going to be your force upon the enemies of the galaxy, then we need to trust each other. And to do that we need-"

"-To not keep secrets."

"Exactly. I need to know why I'm fighting."

"Okay, okay. Maybe you're right." That's the best I'm going to get. "Where did that come from?"

I smile underneath my helmet. "Maybe I was a psychologist in my previous life. So, what's our mission?"

Back to her usual chipper self again she says, "I'll tell you everything on Omega."

Oh for the love of-

"Because there's a lot about the galaxy that everyone knows that you don't." She crooks herself towards Vasir. "Take her omnitool, read the codex. All of it. You might be halfway done by the time we get to Omega, or when she wakes up."

"Omega. I'm holding you to that."

I walk over to her and grab the arm bracelet. These things are wrapped around tight. Dragging it off her involves more than a little grunting and flopping her arm on my shoulder to give myself more leeway. I can bench press a man in combat armour but I can't pull a cybernetic bracelet off someone. Top job, Elanus.

With the same feeling as the sweet release of getting out of dress uniform the bracelet slides off Vasir's arm. "Finally," I mutter under my breath.

Then, with what I can only describe as the power of the cosmic blueshift I'm punched into the ceiling of the cargo hold, Vasir staring up at me with death in her eyes.


	5. Hitchhikers May Be Escaping Convicts

Pro tip: don't try and fight an alien lady who has telekinetic powers when she has the element of surprise. Being flattened on the floor isn't the greatest of times, especially when you can't reach your gun and she has her gun aimed at your head and demanding to know who you are.

"Shepard," I groan, "help."

"And get torn into a million tiny pieces by her biotics? No."

"So that's what…" I think I just gurgled, "it's called."

Vasir - one hand glowing and the other wrapped around a very large pistol - scowls down at me. If I had any memories I'm sure I'd be comparing her to a principal that just caught a problem student doing something extra-problematic, but right now she's only a well-trained killer ready to, well, kill, and the only other person here is me. "I'll ask again," she says, and her monotony is spookier than any sort of screaming, "who are you, and what happened?"

"You know…" ever had that spike in your gut, like some intestinal gremlin is poking your insides with a stick? Vasir's biotic grasp is like that, but constantly stabbing every inch of my body and never stopping, "those are some great questions."

She pushes me down further and I'm pretty sure I'm sinking into the steel of the ship itself at this point. "Answer me."

"Well… first question is a little difficult. Don't remember anything. Woke up, started running. You can call me Elanus, though. Or stowaway if you prefer."

"Woke up?"

The light above Vasir's head gives her a halo. How angelic. If I stop squinting through the pain she morphs into two, then three, then four. Probably not a good sign. "Yeah. On the Citadel."

"I saw you on the loading dock. No human survives that much blood loss."

"Lucky me."

"Where's your drone?"

Like a valve's been cut off breathing suddenly becomes a whole lot harder. "Drone?" I squeak out.

"You sent it over and then- I don't know what happened." She reaffirms her grip on the pistol. Good to know the fear of the unknown extends beyond the human mind. "But you do."

"Normally conduct interrogations with your perp writhing on the ground?" Lifting a finger may as well be lifting a spoonful of a neutron star. Impossible, but also quite peculiar as to how a chunk of neutron star found its way into a spoon and just how the spoon is holding it up.

"Only the good ones."

"How reassuring."

"Answer the question."

The harsh twang of a rib cracking under the sheer stress of localised pressure reverberates up and down my bones. That's just great. "Yeah… Drone? Come- come on out drone."

Vasir and I wait around for a few seconds in the terribly exciting midst of nothing happening. I'm half tempted to ask her if she comes here often, but I'm beaten to the punch when she shatters another rib. "Stop playing coy," she says.

"Why the fuck would I want to play coy?"

"You got up from a pool of your own blood. I'm sure a few broken bones will go over fine."

"My torturer is a sadist. Who could have guessed." A wet yell's wrenched from my lungs when Vasir breaks a third rib. "Fine. Fine. Come on out Shepard."

"What did you just say?" Vasir's scowl vanishes, and with it an iota of the pressure squeezing my organs into paste. I suck in a mouthful of glorious recycled air, and pins and needles scintillate up and down my fingers like they're sparklers. I flop up off my back, a crippled gunslinger in motion. Pistol in hand without me even realising it I take aim at Vasir, and then the gun drops to the floor and I'm clutching my ribs staring up at the ceiling again and shouting some choice obscenities. There goes the rest of my ribs.

Vasir stalks above me, her biotics back on the leash. "Break a couple ribs and no one notices when the rest are about to go."

I scrounge out, "Really effective." I'm more focused on keeping myself awake and the incessant thumping of blood in my ears than Vasir. My vision pulses in tune with my cacophonic heartbeat, and if I let myself drift enough the seeping shadows of unconsciousness creep at the edges of my view. I miss being able to throw a man around like a toy.

A barrel lodges itself against my helmeted temple. "For the last time, the drone."

"You know what? I think she's gotten stage fright."

She rolls her eyes. "You made your bed."

"Wait!"

Vasir's shadow jumps and the pressure on my temple is gone. "There it is," she says, "pretty advanced piece of tech. Dynamic voice, fluid movement scheme, and some very interesting information. VI programming, too?"

Shepard scoffs. "A VI? You think I'm a luddite?"

"And an advanced personality module. Would have cost a pretty penny. I want whatever's on this thing, Elanus, or I space you with a shattered rack of ribs."

"Okay, first of all, she does not speak for me. Second of all, I'm more than willing to share what information I have as long as we all play nice, and third of all," Shepard blooms her outer shell for a second, "you should probably kill her."

Vasir and I let out the same disbelieving _what? _at the same time, only mine's more a strained and sad gurgle.

"I told you I know all about that moon and what Cerberus found there, but if you want further proof I'm more than some drone and Elanus is more than some incompetent stowaway, then put a bullet in her brain and let me show you."

"What are you?"

"I'm the one that teleported you out of the Citadel. I'm the reason we're currently free and burning towards Omega, and I know what the artifact you found is."

Shivering in a cocoon of my own sweat and internal bleeding, I manage to lift one very specific finger towards Shepard, just before Vasir turns to me and splatters my brain against the deck of the cargo hold.

And then I'm opening my eyes to molten lead being poured over the neurons in my grey matter. Not literally, it's just what this migraine is equivalent to. Thankfully the neuronal pathways that allow my meatbag body to generate soundwaves aren't real yet, or otherwise I would have been able to turn the vacuum of space into a concert.

"Sorry, sorry," Shepard says. "Forgot to clear that up before I restored consciousness."

"You're an asshole," I say. There are the vocal cords.

"Easier to restore you from a save than fix all that corrupted data."

I get to my feet and turn to Vasir. She's typing something on her omnitool, her face the perfect copy of a poker champion's. "We need to talk." 

* * *

As far as my brain lets me recall, space should be big, black, and empty. Maybe a few distant stars trillions of kilometres away riding the galactic surf dot the implacable vastness, but your immediate vicinity is a whole giant swath of absolutely nothing. After all, space is rather large, kind of the largest thing there is or ever will be, unless some divine entity decides that they're the new victor and the universe resides in their stomach. Either way, there isn't supposed to be anything out there, but in this case 'supposed' is the operative word, because outside the protection of the _Irssal's _cockpit is a tunnel made of lightning.

Faster-than-light travel, thanks to the power of element zero and the mass effect tends to make things sideways. Like turning space into a tunnel. It was admittedly interesting for the first few minutes - more interesting than nothing, no doubt - but novelty wears off quickly, and where there's no substance to dig into? Well, all that's left is boredom.

"I shot her in the head. You hovered over her for a few seconds, and then she was alive, and unwounded."

"Correct."

"That's not possible."

I bowed out before this conversation began. Something about coming back from the dead makes you not care about anything for a while, including any sort of grudge against the person that made you dead in the first place. Shepard gave Vasir her guarantee she'd keep me in line if anything happened. In the pilot's seat Vasir's surrounded by a cavalcade of terminals and holographic buttons, like a DJ ready to begin her set. Shepard floats above her.

"You saw it with your own eyes."

"Empirical evidence is not the only form of evidence." I'm lounging in the back of the cockpit, scrolling through my very own copy of the codex on one of Vasir's spare omnitools.

"Is Elanus a hologram?"

"If I am, then I'm the closest you can get to the real thing without being it."

"Shepard," I have no idea why but Vasir almost trips up on the name again, "the 'Light' is not an answer to what I saw."

"It's hard to explain to someone that doesn't have it, or has been around it. Truthfully, I don't know enough about it to make heads or tails of it myself. I know it works, I know both Elanus and I can use it, but beyond that there isn't much."

We've kept Omega as our destination. As luck would have it Vasir needs to meet with a contact on the station. Another agent of her Shadow Broker who has information we need to know. Her words, not mine. I'd almost tried to kill her when she said she'd sent information on us to the Broker, but I was swayed after learning that he isn't involved with the Citadel, or the law, at all. 'An information broker that's built an empire on keeping the scales equal.' Not exactly reassuring, but it's better than being ratted out to the authorities we'd already pissed off.

Shepard had told me whoever Vasir's contact was will lead us right to her own contact. Apparently he'd touched base with another of the Broker's agents some time ago and was laying low in a safehouse. When I asked her if this is was why she'd picked out the _Irssal _to stow away on she'd said, "Call it a happy coincidence." I wasn't sure I believed her.

"So," Vasir continues, "you both make use of some nebulous power neither of you understand."

"Essentially," Shepard says.

"Fuck."

That about sums it up. 

* * *

Omega's crimson shadows shine, a blood-soaked oasis in an onyx desert. The gargantuan slabs of metal that make up the steel stalk spin in languid, lazy motions. Hazard lights the size of asteroids litter the bulk of the station, modern day lighthouses for the ragtag fleets of pirates, smugglers, and general outlaws that call Omega home. The rocky, bulbous top is a mushroom's, or perhaps, more aptly, a mushroom cloud's forever locked in place. A little setpiece of destruction tucked away in a tiny corner of the galaxy.

It's beautiful. Or at least it would be if I hadn't been informed about what goes on underneath the shell.

We dock at Port Azazel. The name itself doesn't instill much hope, and the wide array of homeless humans milling about serves to take that hope and bury it alive with stolen dirt. Walking through the cramped and dusky halls that lead us further into Omega's seedy belly is like saying yes to the stranger's drugs then forking over your credit savings for a year's worth of a good time. I should be able to smell the rank fumes of junkies coiled up together in abandoned storefronts, unwashed faces caked in neon red smudges, but my wonderfully regenerating hardsuit filters all of it out. In a weird way I'm disappointed I miss out on experiencing the culture. I spend a fifteen minute elevator ride up part of the stalk next to a vorcha that snaps his - its? - jagged lines of dagger teeth two hundred times while muttering something about a down payment. And yes, I was also surprised that something with a mouth like that could mutter anything.

Finally, we get to where we need to be - a quaint atrium with a working fountain in the middle overlooked by a bevy of apartments with most of their windows locked down tight. Everywhere else we went through in Omega there was at least the coughing of a down-on-their-luck sucker, a merc looking for work, or a thug with a chip on their shoulder. Here, though? The bubbling fountain rules. A shadow shifts from a window when I catch it, and resting on a bench is a salarian the size of a krogan with a grenade launcher in his lap.

Vasir halts in the atrium's entryway. We're shrouded from the low-haze lights that litter the station. "I'm doing the talking," Vasir says. I put my hands up in surrender. Shepard's been tucked in her ethereal plane since we docked.

"This is where he is," she says in my head.

I glance behind us. The apartments that line the block have had their fronts painted recently, and the small cafe has chairs laid out ready for customers to come sit on them, and yet, nobody. Not a single soul besides us.

I lean towards Vasir. "Isn't it a little weird-"

"Quiet."

"Fine. Fine."

There should be people out and about. There should be activity. The codex said there's upwards of eight million people on this station - how could this entire section be abandoned?

Unless they weren't. Unless they were evicted instead.

The Spectre takes a step into the light. The hulking salarian bristles. "Here to see the Colonel?" He pats his launcher's grenade belt.

"Paying with an ace of spades."

He stands, and even this far away it's easy enough to tell he's a good head taller than Vasir. He crooks his head left.

We follow the enforcer into the front lobby of a dingy, rundown, and long forgotten hotel. The salarian walks behind the counter shot through with holes and opens a terminal. "You're Tela Vasir," he says with a glance to the asari, "and you're VIP Two."

"I'd prefer Elanus."

"Noted. You can call me Tazzik."

"If I'm VIP Two, who's VIP One?" Tazzik stops typing and stares at me. He taps one last thing, and part of the wall behind him slides open. Beyond the new threshold is another cramped hallway. We follow Tazzik's lead. Numerous twists and turns later we come to a door embedded into the superstructure of Omega itself. Tazzik bangs against it twice and it thunders like a gong.

"We're clear. Got new friends."

With a pneumatic hiss the slab unhinges itself. We have to step back to not get clobbered in the face as it swings wide open. A stuttering light comes to life inside, and leaning against the wall is a robot, spinning an oversized revolver around one finger.

"Ah ha!" it, or he, exclaims. His eyes and cheeks light up cyan when he talks, and he bounds over to us with an almost childish pep, the revolver still spinning. "Good to see I'm no longer the only one that's come back from the dead."

With a final spin he flips the revolver into the air and slips it into his holster without looking. He extends the other hand towards me. He has a… unicorn horn?

"Call me Cayde."


	6. That Old, Familiar Feeling

The safehouse is less a safehouse and more a safe room. Or a safe box, maybe. The back wall's dominated by a lit workbench where Tazzik toils with a timepiece the size of his head, his launcher leaning against his chair, forgotten. Vasir paces near the door - which is only ten feet or so from Tazzik - and continually taps on her omnitool, face blank. Something about proper clearance and the chain of information, she'd said. I'm just happy to be able to put my feet up and not have to worry about being shot or turned into paste for the first time in my new life.

And speaking of, I've splayed myself out on the one couch after we all exchanged introductions, my head half-subsumed by one of its puffy arms. For a place under control of someone called the 'Shadow Broker', this sure is comfortable. Though, if I stay here too long my arms are going to go numb from not having to carry a weapon or punch someone for five minutes. Oh well, we all make sacrifices.

Cayde twirls a knife between his fingers, the room's dim, blue light glinting off the edge of the silver blade like the light of a neutron star. He struts back and forth in front of the couch, his thick metal boots making little more than feather footfalls on the steel floor. His hood's pulled up to where his horn juts out of his segmented forehead, turning his hollow cheeks into small divets of shadow that somehow obscure the cyan light of his eyes. The tattered cape flows behind him with every step, though there isn't any wind to carry it.

"So," he says, and faces me still twirling the knife. "What's the first thing you remember?"

Compared to Cayde I can only think of myself as inadequate. My hardsuit, all black and grey with a cape that doesn't reach my legs, and a pistol that may as well be shooting crumpled up paper. Cayde's oversized revolver sits snug in its holster, an ace of spades painted on the grip.

Wait, why do I care about what my cape looks like?

"A morgue," I say, and shake the thought away.

"Just a morgue?"

"Well, when Shepard directed me out, there were also people with guns angry with me."

Cayde slips the knife… somewhere, then puts his hands on his hips. "Oh yeah, they'll do that. Don't you Sundance?"

Cayde's ghost - Sundance - appears. "I liked to think of it as a crash course for being a Guardian. You did get out of it A-okay."

"Bah, hindsight's 20/20."

Sundancer flutters. "I don't seem to recall that being your attitude when we escaped those Fallen."

"That's because I've grown, Sundance. Also, quite a brave statement coming from you when you hid inside my cloak the first time we went to The City."

"I was shy."

Cayde spreads his arms. "And then you grew. Anyway," he turns back to me, the inside of his mouth glowing gold, "I'm guessing you got to spend your first hour or so running away with no idea what's going on, right?"

"Basically."

Cayde rubs his hands together. "Excellent."

"Cayde…" Sundance says.

Cayde ignores her. "Where's your ghost? It as shy as mine was?"

Shepard peeks into existence. "'It' is a 'she'."

"Ah ha! My pleasure to meet you in person." Cayde curtsies.

"I knew you were another hunter," Shepard says, plainly.

"Hunter?" I ask.

Cayde points at me. "I'll explain later. Tazzik." The salarian sets his scalpel down on the workbench. The timepiece must be as harsh as him if he's using a surgical tool to operate on it.

"What?"

"How's it coming along?"

Tazzik lifts the clock up. It's so heavy he can't hold it, he has to rest it on the workbench. The face is mired in a criss-crossing maze of sharp steel that, as a whole, create the faint outline of a regular clock face. It would be just a stylised, expensive piece more appropriate at an art exhibit than any home, if not for the white hole in its centre. "Nearly finished."

"That's not a clock is it?" I ask.

Cayde shakes his head. "Good eye. That, my friend, is a little invention of mine I like to call an autonomous omnidirectional communication device."

I look between Tazzik's deadpan stare and Cayde's self-serving smile. "So, a radio?"

Cayde drops his arms. "Well, if you want to be boring, yeah."

"Why are you building a comms array in this safehouse?" Vasir's stopped working on her omnitool.

"See? She gets it. It's a comms array, not just a radio." He taps the side of his head.

"Explain, Tazzik."

"It can't hook up to any network; this tech's incompatible. Did this as a favour."

Cayde shoots finger guns to Tazzik. "My man."

"And how do you know it's incompatible?"

Tazzik shrugs. "This thing's ancient, and Cayde said it was."

"So because a robot-"

"Exo."

Vasir eyes Cayde. "So, because an _Exo, _which is the geth's cousin as far as I can tell, and something we know next to nothing about, said it's incompatible, you believe it to be incompatible."

Tazzik sighs. "I'm not an idiot, Vasir. You might be a Spectre but I've gone through enough as well. These two?" he gestures to Cayde and me. "They're new, something different. But Cayde and I have spent enough time together. He's reliable, dependable, if not a bit grating. I trust him." He clangs on the radio.

"I don't approve. The Broker won't either."

Tazzik smirks and goes back to working on the radio. "He only pays me."

Cayde waltzes over to Vasir. "Too many unknown variables, right?"

Over the orange precipice of her omnitool Vasir grunts affirmative before looking back down. Busy.

"I get it. No respectable soldier wants to walk into a fight without knowing what they're getting into. You're a soldier, right? Yeah, I was too once. Unknown variables can turn clockwork reconnaissance into a massacre, or even worse you could have faulty intel and have your ambush turned into their ambush. With that in mind I want there to be a beneficial relationship between us and you and your Shadow Broker."

"Us?" Vasir says.

Cayde turns and points at me. "Elanus and me. Sundance and Shepard. All four of us."

I sit up. "That's a bit presumptuous."

Cayde scoffs like I offended his dearest family member. "I may be a lone wolf, but Guardians need to stick together. Trust me."

"We'll see. Besides, I don't even know what a 'Guardian' is."

"That means you've got a lot to learn," he says with a wink. Absolute scoundrel.

Vasir types one last message on her omnitool then dismisses the interface. "And what could you provide beyond your sheer existence?"

"Well, besides the fact that I think that's pretty valuable in and of itself, I mean look at me, I also have info on your moon."

Vasir's cold stare turns hot. "What do you know? How do you know?"

"Since you're asking that, that means your boss doesn't want you having the info I've imparted upon my good salarian friend here, and I've picked up enough that I also know he can't go blabbering about it to you without the proper authorisation."

Shepard mentioned something about a moon, and an artifact when I was ringing death's doorbell on Vasir's ship. I release myself from the serene grip of the couch and stand, Shepard floating lazily behind me, stealing glances with Sundance. Are they talking with each other on some ghost-exclusive line? I'll have to ask about that later. I sidle up next to Cayde and turn the one-on-one into a triangle. "Shepard told me I'd learn why I'm here, and not a corpse in the ground when we got to Omega."

"Good, that means she did get my messages."

"Are you proposing a trade?" Vasir asks without acknowledging my existence.

Cayde spreads his arms out - he speaks with his hands as much as his voice. "In a manner. You smuggled something from that moon to somewhere else far away. An artifact. Like, a really old artifact."

Vasir neither confirms or denies, but deflects. "The information you 'imparted' with Tazzik is on file. Somewhere. I'm about to get access to it. I don't need to exchange anything with you."

"Oh, but who said we're just exchanging information? No. You're Shadow Broker's gonna want to know more than the both of us do already, and the only way that's gonna be achieved is by going back to that moon." Cayde crosses his arms. "You're going to need mine and Elanus' help."

Vasir sighs and deflates. "Do you trust him, Tazzik?"

Tazzik puts the radio down and steps back from the workbench, launcher already in hand. "Yes."

"Then you and I need to meet another agent. The Shadow Broker doesn't feel comfortable sending this information in any way other than in person. It's a shit deal, but these are shit times."

"Smart man," Cayde says.

"You two need to stay here. No one can know you're here, or even exist, and people on Omega talk for a free drink."

"Fine by me," I say. That couch is still looking mighty comfy.

Tazzik and Vasir leave the way we came in, and when the steel slab door clasps closed Cayde begins to do yoga. Really?

"Does a robot-"

"Exo."

"Right. Do you actually need to stretch anything?"

"Not for any physical reason." He bends himself down into a full split. Impressive. "That's real nice," he says.

"But a mental one?"

He leans over and touches the cap of his boot. "Yeah. Balances the soul. Reminds me," he pushes himself to his knees and does some complex move I don't know the name of, "that I'm still human."

I squint under my helmet. "Are you human?"

"Hah! Never ask an Exo if he's human. But yeah, under all this metal I'm as human as you. You are a human, right? Not one of those asari?"

"I'm definitely human."

Cayde flings himself into a handstand. "Thank god," he says, his horn scratching the floor, "didn't want to get all hot under the collar again. Sundance?"

The red and white shelled ghost pops into existence. "Cameras already taken care of."

"Brilliant."

"Cameras?" I ask.

Cayde starts doing push-ups while holding his handstand. What a showoff. "Bring that radio over here."

"I thought it was an omnidirectional communication device."

"Ah, that was just showboating," Cayde says, now doing the push-ups with one hand.

I nearly lose my footing when I pick the radio up. I was expecting a lump of metal worthy of a strongman, but it's little more than a paperweight. I flip it over. Good grip, could use it as a frisbee in a pinch. Is Tazzik really that weak? No, I suppose it's the other way.

I bring it over. "Now what?"

"Set it on the floor. Yeah, that's perfect."

Cayde stops showing off and goes back to the right way up. "Now, you know how I called this thing a radio?"

"Cayde?"

"I lied," he says with a shrug, and stomps his foot on the white hole. My world gets sucked into the disc.

* * *

"You get distracted too easily."

I wipe a thick blanket of dust off my visor. Shepard's floating above me. Again. "This sight is getting too common."

"Try falling over less. As I was saying, you get distracted too easily."

I sit up. An incandescent light beams like a supernova. The world's at an angle, like everything's on the slope of a mountain, but nothing's sliding off. My visor polarises itself. "Distracted?"

"Yes, distracted. Cayde played you like a fiddle."

I grab hold of a pillar to pull myself up. My head drags along it without my consent. "Can we have this conversation at a later date?"

"No. We came to Omega for answers and now we're complicit in breaking the trust of the one entity that can help us figure out what's on that moon. Why didn't you demand answers?"

I check all my parts are still here. Good. "Why didn't you?"

Shepard locks up. "I was predisposed."

"Distracted."

Shepard flies right up to my face. "No. Sundance had some very important things to say."

Pins and needles jitter in my hands. "Like what?"

"Like," she says, before dropping her shell around her eye. "Damnit."

"Hey, hey." I take Shepard in my cupped palms. "I get your point. I think we were both… smitten with the fact there are others like us. Just means for next time we know to be more prepared."

Shepard nods herself and 'opens' her eye again. "Yeah. Yeah. Next time they won't get us."

"Exactly." For the first time I take a good look at where we actually are. Clearly, whatever that disc is, it's not a radio. Teleporter, more like. We're in the middle of a long, abandoned walkway, the cosmic dust having long claimed ownership over this part of Omega. "Where's Cayde?"

"That's the thing, Elanus. He used us, then ran, and now we're back to being on our own again."

"Cayde wouldn't do that." Over the walkway's edge is a long drop into a hole with no bottom. How far down the station are we?

"We've known Cayde for less than an hour."

Before I can retort, a voice bursts from around the corner. "Ah ha! There you are, knew I could rely on a Guardian to deal with a first teleport without trouble."

Cayde struts up to me and swings his arm around my shoulders. "There is the greatest noodle place two minutes that way."

* * *

The bell on the door jingles like we're walking into a family-owned general store. The noodle place - simply called Sal's - is tucked into a corner of a deserted section of Omega, its only advertising a half-broken hologram half a kilometre away. And yet, its thirteen tables are packed with risk of overflowing. Every colour and every size of every common race on Omega is chowing down on their favourite bowl of steaming noodles. Each table we walk past there's a "Hey Cayde!" or a "Good to see you again, Cayde!" and even one "You still owe me for that bet, Cayde."

"Been busy?" I ask.

"You could say that."

We stop at the counter at the back. "Hey Sal," Cayde says to the flaps that shield the kitchen from the rest of the restaurant. An asari with a face tattoo brushes past me, two full plates of noodles balanced on her arms.

A krogan with half his face scarred off appears through the flaps, wringing his three-fingered hand on a dish rag. A fierce smile overtakes his face. "Cayde," he says with wide open arms, "what're hankering for?"

Cayde leans over the counter and says with a hushed voice, "The back room."

"Right this way."

The true power of Sal's is in the kitchen, or more accurately, the noodle abattoir. A platoon of chefs work like clockwork, the noodles helpless against the onslaught. "How does this place stay profitable?" I ask.

Cayde shrugs.

Sal brings us to an unmarked door and swings it open. "Yours for the next hour."

"Lifesaver." The two hug. Sal, despite being twice the size of Cayde breaks the hug first. He walks away, shaking his head and muttering, "Iron fuckin' grip."

Inside the backroom, Cayde flicks the light on. A mop leans against a rack of cleaning supplies. "Cayde, this is a closet."

"It may be a closet, but," he falls into a chair by a table and knocks against the solid wall, "great for private conversations."

Don't get distracted, Elanus. "This better be about that moon."

A bowl of noodles appears from thin air on the table. "Thank you Sundance." He picks up a chopstick and points it at me. "All that and more."

So, for the next hour, Cayde and I talk with consistent noodle intermissions. He tells me about the Traveler, about the Ghosts and Guardians, about the Vanguard and The Last City, about how where he's from there's no such thing as a friendly alien. No such thing as alliances or hierarchies or the Citadel. Just humanity fighting a war they have to win, that's been fought for hundreds of years, and how I, no matter how disconnected, am now a part of. It's not easy to take in, but he also tells me us Guardians are equipped to deal with the things in the universe that don't make sense. I don't have a reply - how can I? I simply sit there and eat my noodles. I'll confront it all later. Thank God the human mind is so good at compartmenalisation.

At the fifty-minute mark, I bring up the Shadow Broker. "Why did you lie about your teleporter?"

"And potentially give the Shadow Broker Vex technology? That, my friend, is a bad move. Why? Well, first of all, Sundance and I did some digging. Shadow Broker's not nice. He plays the whole table, good and bad, and he's more than willing to throw civilians in the fire to get his way. And second, which I personally believe to be far more pertinent? His name is the 'Shadow Broker'. I mean honestly, what kinda good guy calls themselves that? No good guy is the answer."

I lean forward on the table and push my empty bowl away. "Then why do you want us to help with their moon?"

"Because I lied about that, too. If I were a gambling man, which I am, I'd wager Ace," he taps his revolver, "that the Shadow Broker is far more interested in using what's in that moon to further his agenda than any altruistic notion. We're not gonna help him, we're gonna stop him, and make sure nothing gets off that moon."

"And what's in that moon?"

Cayde stands and wipes his smile away. "Time you learned about the Hive."


	7. Oh, So That's How It Is

Cayde had woken in the darkness, but Sundance was there to light his way.

In the back closet of Sal's noodle shop, he told me about the Hive. About their magic, about their rituals and incantations, and about the way they devour Light. He told me how he killed them and ran through caverns of black rock and sleek, metal hallways. Inside the moon - Hyushin - was a facility. A research station. When Cayde made his escape it was little more than a tomb.

Under Tazzik's fine control our shuttle swerves through Omega's underbelly with a swan's grace. Cayde and I are in the backseat, his face hidden underneath a mask to hide his robotic nature, his eyes and not exactly inconspicuous horn the only features left bare. Vasir sits in the front, fiddling on her omnitool. I rub the metal bracelet wrapped around the top of my forearm - I have my own now, and it'll be used primarily for its radio functionality.

When Cayde and I teleported back to the safehouse it had been just before Vasir and Tazzik returned from meeting with their contact. The Shadow Broker had deemed it necessary to impart as much information about Hyushin and the Hive as possible for when we traveled there.

Hyushin—named after an ancient asari ruler—is the largest moon of the gas giant Gaelon in the pedestrian Zelene system. When it was first mapped by the Salarian Union Hyushin was RF4755-1, and any peculiarities that might have been noted were overlooked for its master's rings, made up of pulverised artificial material Citadel scientists theorised to have belonged to an ancient mining structure over 300 thousand years old. For a time, in-depth study was conducted around Gaelon and its ring system before the Citadel's cutting edge minds moved onto the next galactic find, leaving the door open for another to step inside.

The first ones to take up the offer were the asari. Zelene, only a few lightyears from the economic free trade powerhouse of Illium, made a ripe field for prospective mining and colonisation efforts. Those efforts were compounded by the fact Zelene sat on the edge of the Terminus Systems, which, as I'm told, is ruled by the lawless. If Omega is any indication for the greater political landscape of the Terminus, then frankly it only makes sense. The asari scoured Zelene, ripped out what they could, made footnotes on previous salarian research around Gaelon, then promptly moved back to Illium.

For the next four centuries Zelene, as a backwater, relay lacking system twiddled its cosmic thumbs, seeing the occasional pirate, research team, or star-studded explorer that never stayed for long. Hyushin was only ever given once overs, never dug into deeper when a much more obvious novelty was there to overshadow it.

Until, that is, two years ago.

Tazzik takes us down a dim, red tunnel. Omega needs a new interior decorator; this place loves red too much. "How much longer?" Vasir asks.

"Fifteen."

Cayde leans over to me. "You're gonna need a better gun than whatever peashooter you have right now."

"Any suggestions?"

"Oh, I have something in mind."

"Can't wait." I turn back to the shuttle's window, neon markers careening by.

In 2182, the human supremacy organisation Cerberus made landfall on Hyushin, the first time a Citadel race had done so since the salarians when Zalene was discovered. In hindsight it was a stroke of luck for the Shadow Broker, but when he first received word that one of his moles in Cerberus—a man named Wilson—was assigned to the Hyushin team, he didn't think much of it. At least, not as much as he normally did for Cerberus activities, which as Vasir says, is quite a lot already.

As time passed, and more of Hyushin's innards were explored, and the Hyushin team grew, and grew, and grew, the Broker's galaxy-spanning eye honed in on the inconspicuous moon more and more. Wilson had become invaluable. It was a slow trickle of information, but it was more than enough.

Cayde unholsters his hand cannon and holds it between us. "This here is what I like to call the Ace of Spades."

"It's formidable." My fingers twitch. I want to reach out and take it. Why? I couldn't say, but the desire burns. I have to ball my hands into fists to restrain myself. It's like the Light that makes undead me, well, me, is desperate for the connection, but the question is, what is there to connect with inside a gun?

"You don't know the half of it." Cayde laughs. "This bad boy has gotten me out of more binds than I count. You need one of your own."

"Somehow I don't see you giving me yours."

Cayde clicks his tongue, or whatever the equivalent is inside his mouth. "You're bang on the money with that. Whoever kills me gets the Ace. But, when we fly off Hyushin you'll have your own backup on your thigh, trust me."

"Are you trying to make me excited to go to a moon infested with Hive?"

Cayde shrugs. "Maybe."

"How do you know I'll find one these guns"—I crook my head down to the Ace—"in Hyushin?"

"Call it a hunter's intuition." Code for 'I'm not telling you'.

Cerberus had found the relics of beings their best minds dated to at least a billion years old. Thousands of times the Protheans' elder. Those billion year old relics, as Cayde so graciously provided during Vasir's briefing, were the Hive's. A colossal find for the galactic archaeology community, but that wasn't the kicker. The real discovery was that those relics were active. Exuding energy that drove the conventional equipment Cerberus first brought into Hyushin haywire, and even energies they couldn't recognise at all.

Wilson's reports labeled it 'incredible, unprecedented, immensely dangerous'.

Cerberus disagreed on the latter.

Shuffling the relics off Hyushin wasn't possible thanks to their inexplicable deactivation when they were taken out of system, so everything remained confined to the ever expanding research facility. An annoyance in the moment, but something else in hindsight the Shadow Broker thanked the stars was the case.

Half a month ago, Wilson's reports ceased. The same day, the Hyushin facility broadcasted an unencrypted emergency transmission on all possible channels, and a ship—the _Normandy_—was the first responder. Its ground team searched the facility for survivors, found none, acquired the artifact Vasir later stole, then bugged out once their commander took a sword to the chest. Her name was Shepard.

Tazzik brings the shuttle down in front of a shuttle station with suspicious crimson stains littering the stairs down into a marketplace. Thirteen different kinds of gangsters and mercs are bartering for goods like stay-at-home spouses, only instead of sweaters and khakis it's body armour and thick helmets, and instead of produce it's heavy duty weaponry.

"Get going," Tazzik says with a crook of his head.

"You're not coming?" I ask. Tazzik's hands are still locked on the shuttle's controls.

"Too risky," Vasir says. "Under normal circumstances the Shadow Broker doesn't have lateral cooperation between agents. Work's done through proxies on top of proxies. These aren't normal circumstances, but we still have to minimise risk of exposure. That means you're with me, Elanus, and Cayde goes with Tazzik."

"We go get the ship and you go get the guns," Cayde says.

Vasir's Broker contact had given her a blank cheque for heavy ordnance and the keys to a ship with an IFF tag 'guaranteed entry through the blockade'.

After the _Normandy _hightailed it back to the Citadel, the Council had seen it fit to implement a strict militarised blockade across the entire Zelene system. Turns out when a galactic war hero gets thrown on life support by some unknown faction in a terrorist organisation's abandoned facility, it gets taken seriously.

Vasir and I step out onto the landing. I make it a point to avoid the dried red stains on the ground—I don't want aged blood sticking to my boots. Tazzik and Cayde fly away, but not before Cayde gives me a wink and two-fingered salute. Vasir clasps a helmet on. "Guns, guns, guns," she says, and we descend into the illicit market.

It's not every day you wade through throngs of people with deep cut scars crossing their faces and shotguns capable of turning your chest to paste slung on their backs. It's even rarer to find yourself among them on a shopping trip. It's novel to catch the sight of a batarian missing half a hand trading an assault rifle for a packet of grenades, then moving on to the next stall like he's buying ingredients for dinner. Faceless mercenaries push past us with bumps to the shoulders, and if this wasn't the hired killer convention I'd take it as a personal insult, but said hired killers are only going to kill you if they're paid. Or drunk enough.

The marketplace proper is lined up in a series of five rows, each one more deadly than the last. It isn't just illegal guns exchanging illegal hands for other illegal goods and credits - some stalls are selling armour and shields, others drugs and numerous recreational activities, and a select few advertise a 'gamble of an asari lifetime'. They're the most popular stalls—when I ask Vasir what the gamble is she says something about a club called Afterlife.

The two of us stride down the centre row. The tide of criminals parts almost unconsciously in Vasir's wake, like she's a sinkhole swallowing up the earth around it. A turian decked out in Blue Suns gear locks his eyes to the floor when we pass.

"What's that all about?"

"They see my gear, they move."

She's clad in a muted onyx-black set of reinforced armour, the helmet completing the bulky ensemble. A few crimson lights wax and wane in languid cycles on the chestpiece. "Best gear credits can buy."

"How much do Spectres get paid?"

Vasir chuckles. "We don't. I'm just good at my job."

We pass by a pack of Eclipse arguing with a krogan trying to sell a shotgun that looks like it could tear my arm off trying to fire it. Behind him is a sparkling rack of collapsed rifles and a spiked grenade launcher.

"Why aren't we buying from any of these stalls? Their guns look good enough to me."

"Not enough firepower," she says. Her complete deadpan is either because she's not kidding or her humour's drier than mine. The video Cayde showed me from his escape of Hyushin said enough about the Hive, though. His Ace of Spades shattered skulls with a single pull of the trigger, but something about that hand cannon is different, like it's sentient. Like it knows it's a gun and takes pride in its job. The 'peashooter' on my hip and rifle on my back are just complex contraptions of dead metal. Being near the Ace of Spades is like seeing family again.

"And where are we getting enough firepower?"

We come to the other end of the market. We're greeted by a short, rusted railing and an overlook. The marketplace must be on a plateau, or the roof of another building in Omega's uneven steel congregation, because far in the distance is a rainbow wall of colour—a whole district of clubs and 24/7 nightlife. It's too far away and the marketplace too close to hear the music, but the neon lights jump across the spectrum and penetrate the omnipresent red haze like disco floodlights. I turn over and look at the back of my hand—an ad for a drug called _Hypes _is reflecting off the glove.

"We're buying guns from a club?" I ask.

Vasir walks close to the edge and bangs her fist on the ground. A second later a tile pops itself up, a three fingered claw in tow. A turian with black scales and one eye smiles up at us - as best as a turian can, anyway. "Good to see ya again, Vasir."

"Drakam. Guns." I can hear the smile in her voice.

* * *

The _Normandy _returning to the Citadel with a dying Commander Shepard sent the Presidium into a panic. Enough of a panic for Vasir to alter ship manifestos, turn off some security systems for half a minute, and have the _Normandy's _Hive cargo shipped off-station within an hour of the ship docking. When I asked what the artifact was she told the truth—she had no idea, but Shepard's team must have taken it for a reason, so the Shadow Broker needed it, too.

It was a quick and dirty plan with a good chance of failure, but the Broker ordered it anyway. Vasir called it out of character—the Broker hadn't build an information empire extending from the Citadel to the edge of the Perseus Veil by devising and executing plans on the same day, but by taking every precaution possible. Vasir hadn't had all the pieces to play with on the Citadel, but the job's pay was quadrupled so she kept her mouth shut and did as she was told.

Now that she does? It worries her even more. Two agents working in tandem instead of with hired proxy teams to hide connections to the Broker, trusting two unknowns, and the kicker of having a venerated war hero murdered in the hospital are not the signs of a man confident in retaining his station.

The Hive, quarantined to a moon in a sector of near-forgotten space, had the Shadow Broker running scared.

We ascend the ladder from Drakam's den, the stench of torn apart mass drivers clinging to my cape like rotten fruit. Who knew guns could smell that bad? Two thick steel cases hang from Vasir's shoulders, the third slung over my back. "I can carry all three," I say after the tile slides back into place, disappearing into the floor.

She looks out to the club district. "I'm fine," she says, but the words are an afterthought.

The Shadow Broker having Shepard murdered was surprising. Wouldn't someone apparently so capable be a boon in the fight? The Shadow Broker had decided no, because the wound that had thrown her in a coma had been infected. Not like a rusty nail in your foot that gives you tetanus, but like a seething, fetid cut that gives the attending doctor visions of a cataclysm. Vasir said Shepard was killed as a means of containment. Cayde had given me a look so brief it could have been my imagination when she said that.

Vasir walks up to the railing and puts her arm out. She holds two fingers up to her visor.

"What are you doing?"

"Quiet."

Thinking back on it, I never asked how, and who killed Shepard—getting through the best protections a galactic government can provide couldn't be easy.

I go to ask her. Or I would, if Vasir didn't scream to get down before the thundering crack of a sniper rifle ripped a spout of purple blood from her chest.


	8. I'll Just Leave This Here

"We have a problem."

Shots burst over the radio. "Got enough of our own," Tazzik says.

"Vasir got a big round right through the chest."

Tazzik mumbles "Where the fuck is Cayde" under his breath before saying, "Is she dead?"

I look down at her—face is pale enough, but her chest keeps rising and falling. "Not yet."

"She should have medigel." An explosion fizzles over the radio.

"And where do I find medigel?" Another shot rings out above my head, cracking a display rifle in two. The stall I dragged Vasir behind is little more than a thick slab of metal more appropriate in a factory than a market—mercenaries.

"Utility compartment. Left thigh."

I prop her leg up on mine. A little rectangle juts out right where Tazzik said. When I don't find a proper way to open it, I just rip it off. "Sorry."

I grab what I assume to be the medigel—a little packet labeled 'Medigel'—and tear it open. "I have it. Now what?"

"Rub it over where she got shot," Tazzik says, losing his patience. Whether it's with whoever's attacking him or me I can't tell. Maybe both?

The medigel is like, well, a gel, but it almost seems to have a mind of its own in the pouch. Shaking off the thought of sentient goo I scoop up some with my hand and slaver it over the wound in Vasir's chest. Whatever gun that sniper has, I'd be happy betting that it's designed specifically to take out big, important things. Like vehicles and mechs, and of course Spectres in highly advanced combat armour.

Another round impacts the stall, and I can feel the force of it travel through the metal and into my back. Whoever's trying to kill us, they're really trying to kill us.  
With the medigel applied, it's like the bleeding wound begins to travel back in time. It doesn't suck the blood back in, but it does the next best thing by slurping it up and, if I had to hazard a guess, use the organic components of the blood to fuel its own work—whatever the work is, I'm not exactly a woman of science. The point though, is that the wound began to close, and the harsh, scraping breathing coming from Vasir's helmet slowly softened into an almost peaceful sleep.

I say almost peaceful because we're being shot at.

"Alright I think she's stabilising."

"Good. Stay with her until she can move again."

I peek my head over the stall. Bad idea, because I nearly get my head blown up. "And be sitting ducks?"

"I don't know who these people are, or how they know who we are, but if Vasir is killed, or worse, captured, we're in deep shit." Something like the wet squelch of fist in face spurts over the radio.

"Why?"

After the fifth merc got an involuntary lobotomy the whole gaggle of shoppers decided it would be a good idea to hightail it off the plateau. Either with the intent of hiding in a hole like Drakam until the whole thing blows over, or to get their buddies and teach the ace shooter a lesson who the hell knows. Right now, though? It's just me, Vasir, and said ace shooter wanting nothing more than to mount our heads on a wall.

Why do they have to play the most dangerous game with me as the target? To be the hunter—now that's the life.

"Because," Tazzik yells an obscenity before continuing, "she and her omnitool has all the information on Hyushin."

"Oh. Can't the Shadow Broker, I don't know, purge all the information off her omnitool?"

"No. He trusts her too much." There's some baggage there, but now's hardly the time.

"And what if this sniper's friends come knocking like they have with you?" I pull my own rifle from my back. It's nothing special, but it's more than my peashooter.

"You can't die. Take advantage of that."

"That's your plan? One-woman attrition?"

"I'm a little busy here."

"Yeah well, don't die. You're not as special as me."

Tazzik only responds with a roar, a following, muffled explosion, and, "I'm gonna try and make my way back to you. Cayde's disappeared, and I don't know where the bastard went."

"Doesn't sound like Cayde."

Tazzik grumbles. "You don't know him."

"I kinda know him." Another crack, another chip in the stall.

"Just stay with Vasir."

Yeah, we'll see about that. I look her over—as soon as she's up and ready for action again she could take on a platoon with what she's running. She's a big girl—she'll be fine. Now that she's not bleeding to death, anyway.  
I try and take an angle against our would-be assassin, but they're homed in like a goddamn hawk. Every time I peek out by the smallest sliver there's another thunderous crack against my ears and I have to scramble up next to the limp Vasir.

"You're a real bastard," I whisper.

"I could be of some help." Shepard appears in front of me—my ghost, not the dead soldier.

I freeze. "I may have forgotten you existed."

Shepard buzzes. "I figured."

"So, how could you help?"

"Well," she begins. "Being as small as I am, I'm quite gifted at recon." The smugness oozes off her like honey from a hive.

"And you can do the whole vanishing thing."

"That's dependent on my proximity to you."

I get an idea. The stall we're cowering behind isn't all the way up at the railing. It's a few columns down, courtesy of my own brilliant foresight that a synthetic wood stall wouldn't cut it against what's most likely an anti-materiel rifle. "How far can you go out?" I ask.

"Oh, a hundred metres, maybe. Any further and I'm shucked back into real space."

"And how far away is that sniper?"

Shepard shrugs. "Two hundred metres. Give or take ten or twenty."

"Well, you can't go knock him out, but you can still get over there without being seen."

The bastard's shot at us enough times I know the delay between each shot like the beating of my heart Only problem is the delay's short enough I can't orient myself for a shot. Rolling to the next stall over? Well, that shouldn't be a problem.  
'Shouldn't' being the operative word. Best laid plans of mice and men and all that.

Bracing myself for an eviscerated spine and/or brain I bait another shot. When it misses, I bound over the top of the stall with a final look at Vasir and roll behind the next stall up. A second shot snags the end of my cloak and sends it billowing out like I'm a superhero.

I repeat the experience two more times, losing another chunk of fabric in the process, but I'm closer to the edge of the marketplace now and no worse for wear.

"Damn, I'm getting good."

A shot rips through the bottom of the stall and turns my leg the other way around with an accompanying performance from my spraying blood. I bleat out an uncouth expletive and drop on my side, my head perfectly lined up with the new hole in the stall.

"You prick," I say. My head gets blown off.

I pop back into existence next to the railing overlooking the plummeting drop into lower sections of Omega, a stall thicker than the one I died behind covering me.

"Wow," Shepard says. "That was easier than whatever you were doing."

"You're flippant at the worst times, you know that?"

She ignores me. "I can zip over there without him seeing. Watch."

Shepard vanishes. Ten seconds later she reappears halfway across the divide, zipping under walkways and shuttle stations. Another crack and I'm reminded why I shouldn't be poking my head out so brazenly.

"How're we looking?"

Shepard's voice buzzes in my ear. "Something disorienting is about to happen."

"Excuse-"

I'm cut off by a video feed appearing inside my helmet. Shepard's, presumably, if the whizzing through buildings and up elevator shafts is any indication.

"Oh," I say. "You've got good control."

"I'd hope so. This is basically the same as walking."

She flies up a set of stairs and comes out to the top floor of an unfinished hotel. Or whatever constitutes as a temporary place to sleep on Omega. Our shooter's holed up in a little dugout with dusty concrete pillars flanking him on either side. His rifle rests on an unfurnished ledge, and the top half of his face is covered in a cybernetic mask.

"This is our guy."

"Looks like a cosplayer."

"Yeah well, he's already killed you once."

"Point," I duck out of cover for a split second, baiting another shot, and in the delay I bring my rifle up and take my own. "Taken."

In Shepard's feed my shot plinks off the shooter's ledge. Near miss. He yanks his rifle into his arms and ducks out of the room. "He's relocating," Shepard says.

Shepard follows him, and as he moves throughout the floor a little waypoint appears on top of him. How handy. With free reign to align my shot I take my sweet time tracking him with the scope through the walls. He's going for a stairwell.

Right at the threshold of the stairwell I take my shot. He doesn't react.

"Oh, you bitch." Turns out my sniper rifle doesn't have the stopping power to go through that much material and find its way to the other side.

"He's going up."

"Of course he is."

As helpful as the waypoint is, it doesn't do much help when I can't shoot the man who's been successfully shooting me and Vasir for a good ten minutes already. I scurry over to the plateau's ledge and peer over. Yeah, the drop's still as sheer as it was the first time I looked, before this whole thing kicked off.

"How big of a drop could I survive, you think?"

Shepard doesn't even pause in her pursuit to say, "What?"

"It's a simple question."

Our sniper rockets up another set of stairs and barges through onto the top floor. Great.

"I don't know," Shepard says. "What are you going to do?"

"Nothing ventured, nothing gained," I say under my breath. I get a running start, and with an unnatural boost I catapult over the railing into the divide between the marketplace and the bustling club life.

For a moment—one, blissful moment—I'm an eagle soaring through the night sky ready to hunt its ill-fated prey, and return to the next to barf out dinner for my children. Wait, do eagles even do that? Regardless, my feet are running on air and my arms are wings. And then, they're not. And then I'm plummeting down a 200 foot drop towards the flat steel of the roof of a walkway, surreptitiously decorated by thin spires used for who-the-fuck knows what. I rush through the stale air that's probably mugged some poor sod and reach my arms out to grab hold of a fast approaching spire apex.

The sound I make when I collide with the spire is something along the lines of _splat _mixed in with an expletive. I've clutched one arm around the pole after smashing my face and chest against the cold steel, knocking the breath out of my lungs like Houdini's manslaughterer decided to punch me in the gut, too. The fingers of my dangling arm are splayed backwards ninety degrees, give or take a few, and the throbbing pain that shoots up into my brain reminds me of a night of drinking you're supposed to forget. A groan slithers its way out of my mouth, and I suck the spittle back into my mouth lest I want the inside of my mask to fill up.

"May have, uh, broken a few things."

"I heard," Shepard says in full monotone. "Now, get the hell down from there unless you want another bullet through your brain."

True to her word, our gunman's setting up again. How does he see through that mask? There aren't any eyeholes to speak of—actually, I don't even know if my mask has eyeholes. Oh well, it probably does.

"Elanus!"

"Right, right."

I begin to scamper down the spire a few feet at a time, but by the time the cyborg's eyeing through the scope again I'm only halfway down. "Shit," I say to myself, squeeze my eyes shut, and begin sliding down the rest of the way like an old timey firefighter.

"Get to cover," Shepard says, and when I get to the ground—the roof of a walkway—I dive behind a metal box. Air regulation, maybe?

Said dive leads to my broken fingers smashing into the metal floor. I hold them tight to my chest, moaning through the pain. "Can't you come heal me?"

"Too risky. He could see me."

"Oh, it's too risky for you, is it?"

"I can't come fix you, but I can distract him."

I stop squirming. A shot rocks the box I'm laying behind. "How?"

"Like I said I'm great for recon, but I'm also great for being a nuisance. Plus, I'm sure I have a zap in here somewhere."

"Well, don't die."

Shepard chuckles. "Wouldn't dream of it."

The feed cuts off, but over the comms there's the quick scurry of a pistol being drawn. That's my queue.

I flip over the box, heedless of the incessant pulsing in my fingers and chest and start sprinting across the top of the walkway. Shuttles and skycars careen overhead, and one or two are flying so low they manage to rattle the walkway like it's a suspension bridge. The club district paints a heady stream of fluorescent light across the world when I start getting close to it—already there's a party, probably filled to the brim with drugs, happening on the ground level under a sign that reads _Sponsored by the Blue Suns._

A party sponsored by a mercenary company. Now I have seen it all.

Another scuffle peeps over the comms. "How are we doing?"

"A little busy!"

"Got it."

With one hand I scramble up to the ground level of the club district. The waypoint marks the cyborg at the tippy top of the building I'm standing under. Wonder if there's an elevator I can use?

I rush past a cornucopia of partygoers dressed to the nines in the most bedazzling neon lycra and hyper-revealing clothes into the foyer of the building, the bass-boosted music dimming only slightly when the front doors swing closed again. It's all locked down—still under construction—but there's still a turian passed out on a leather couch with a huge bottle tightly gripped in his hands, close to his chest like a baby.

When there are no elevators to kindly offer an express trip up to the top floor I barge into the stairwell, taking the steps three at a time. "You good?" I ask Shepard.

"Just get here!"

By the time I've ascended the final staircase I'm somehow more invigorated than I was before I started. Sure, fingers are still broken and it hurts to expel air from my lungs, but I'm paradoxically ready to tango with a rhinoceros.

"I'm here."

Shepard doesn't respond.

I pull out my pistol. "Shepard?"

The waypoint's gone. Oh, _fuck._

I sprint through the unfinished halls of the top floor, one arm hanging limply from my side, swinging like a swingset whenever I swerve around corners, the other rigid like a log with pistol in hand.

"Shepard," I scream out.

I turn another corner and get a fist in the cheek for my troubles.

I sway on my feet before bringing the pistol up. I get a single shot off before it's kicked out of my hand and I'm shoved to the ground, face first. The wheeze that shoots out of my mouth belongs more on a dog's chew toy than a human woman. A foot falls onto my broken fingers. The howl the pain rips out of me is unbecoming of someone with the title of 'Guardian', if I have to be honest.

The cyborg flips me over, rears his clenched fist back for a punch, but instead of his gauntleted hand dropping on my face like hammer on anvil it meets my own, other unbroken hand and doesn't budge. For a split second we both freeze. His fist has little more force than that of a feather's. I smile underneath my helmet, pull him down to me and headbutt him right in his big, dumb, cyborg eyemask.

He collapses backwards with a grunt, little pieces of metal breaking off and showering me and the floor. I get to my feet and tackle him, ignoring the pain in my fingers. "What did you do to Shepard?" I'm squishing his face against the concrete floor, and he sputters a string of unintelligible garbles.

"What did you do?" I repeat.

"He did nothing."

I look up, and there's Shepard with a scratch on her shell.

"Oh," I say. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I had to keep quiet."

My grip on the cyborg loosens thanks to the incorrigible pain of my fingers, but I figure he's down for the count. "You could have helped. Maybe hit him on the head, like on the Citadel."

Shepard hushes quiet. "I was scared."

My anger deflates at her admission. "It's okay you floating light-"

Sword.

Sword through my abdomen.

Someone's screaming through clenched teeth and I'm confident that someone is me. I keel over on the ground clutching the wound. The wet _schlick _as the blade's extracted from my lower torso is the final deathknell, along with the gurgle that begins somewhere in the back of my throat.

Who the fuck uses a sword?

I can now firmly say I don't wish a sword in the intestines of my worst enemy, which may very well be the cyborg sprinting away in my increasingly hazy vision. Either way, the world turns dark and then I'm staring out the ex-sniper's nest towards the marketplace.

"Any way to track him?"

Shepard shrugs. "I could hack into the shoddy security systems these clubs have, but no promises. I think we have a bigger issue, though."

An unmarked dropship swoops down to the abandoned plateau. Soldiers in full body gear jump out, then, with great haste, return to the ship's bowels, a limp body in one of the soldier's arms.

Before I can radio Tazzik he radios me. "We have a problem."

"Yeah, we do."

"These aren't any regular mercs. This is Cerberus."

I curse myself before saying, "Well, Cerberus just took Vasir."


End file.
